obvious wip and idk how you got here in the first place
My old self from high school would kill me but I unironically like Fates. It provides a lot of flexibility for builds, but the Fates Randomizer ups that to 11. Story sucks but a lot of Fire Emblem is predictable (cough awakening cough) so it doesn't matter too much.
Echoes is a really good way to do a remake, first of all. It keeps it maybe a bit close to the original in terms of map/unit design (though the units added are nice). However, dungeon crawling is such a good idea and way to make the gameplay feel more active. Story is fine, I like Berkut as an antagonist and the fact it's slightly more grey in terms of the overal conflict is nice. Unfortunately, the game is aggresively sexist towards Celica at points and I swear the original Gaiden writers had a thing for kidnapping because a good chunk of the women get that too.
placeholder text since i am not bothering with capitalization for now but 5+ chains make my brain happy. i like the sega puyo games better for writing and gameplay personally because like the echoes case above compiles writing is... also sexist but in the weird way. most of this is because sega makes satan/dark prince into even more of a guyfailure than he is in the compile games which makes it a lot more jokey and less overtly creepy when he pines for arle. guy should be on an fbi watchlist regardless.
i will say satan is fun but with that caveat he shouldn't be as high on my favorite characters list as he is. it's probably because i really enjoy pathetic men (derogatory) and this series has a lot of them so feminism win
some of my favorite puyo characters in vague order for me are: schezo, ringo, satan/dark prince, ecolo, klug, rulue, ex, and suketoudara. in terms of ships, i like satanex i guess? and draco/witch because disaster lesbians. schezo is def somewhere on both aromantic and asexual spectrum so i think if he gets shipped with anyone it should be a queerplatonic relationship.
Personal favorite two games are a tie between 20th Anniversary and Tetris 1 since they both have suprisingly good writing (and Tetris 1 has a VERY good English dub) and solid gameplay. It's hard to mess up Puyo gameplay to be fair but Chronicles in RPG mode somehow did it and I'm still scared to go back to that.
As of the time of writing this I have yet to finish 3 but I think the atmosphere is sooo good. Writing is more interesting than 4 and I've enjoyed the sidequests I've done so far.
New Vegas is probably my favorite game to mod (sorry skyrim and fallout 4) and is also just great at providing sandbox freedom in terms of weapon choice and character builds. I don't have much else that I can think of right now but I can beat the game pretty consistantly in 10-15 hours with side content since I know the map well. The game is as long or as short as you make it. Also pacifist options are great and I'm glad they're lowkey broken in this.
4 would be here but I don't like the writing or gameplay loop as much as in New Vegas and it doesn't have the oppressive atmosphere of 3. I do like some Brotherhood (bad guys)/Minutemen (the blatant best ending) writing and most companions though. Scribe Haylen is criminally underrated as a character and it's probably because she's not a companion and is technically fully optional to meet. Will say though, Blind Betrayal might be one of my favorite quests in the series but it's not worth suffering through a ton... a megaton of dungeon quests for.
I really should play another elder scrolls game (which is either morrowind via openmw or oblivion) but Switch Skyrim is an insanely good port, albiet not a 60 dollar worthy one by any means.
anyways skyrim is super sandboxy and even though i think the writing is generally not the greatest (or even good?) i think the individual characters still shine a bit. most of this is that you end up at the top for any given faction quest which makes me not want to do more than one or two a run because that doesn't really make sense in universe. it's a bit too chosen one-y for my taste? exploration is super fun in game except when you have to do yet another stupid dungeon or something. The game is honestly better if you treat it like a life simulator with plot and combat compared to an RPG.
Wow, a Wii Sports clone ends up here? Well, Go Vacation is a really good minigame collection/open world exploration game by Bandai Namco in 2011, and then ported/remade on the Switch more recently. I actually prefer the Wii version due to the additional minigames - specifically the Wii MotionPlus ones that were cut - and good usage (mostly) of motion controls.
will add more later